National Catholic Reporter: Content by Maureen Dalyhttp://ncronline.org/rss.xml/35500
enThe long shadow of the martyr mythhttp://ncronline.org/books/2013/03/long-shadow-martyr-myth
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
<a href="/authors/maureen-daly">Maureen Daly</a> </span>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><img alt="03292013p27pha.jpg" src="/sites/default/files/03292013p27pha.jpg" style="width: 119px; height: 180px; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; margin: 3px; float: left;" />THE MYTH OF PERSECUTION: HOW EARLY CHRISTIANS INVENTED A STORY OF MARTYRDOM<br />
By Candida Moss<br />
Published by HarperOne, $25.99<br /><br />
In the first few pages of <em>The Myth of Persecution</em>, I had the feeling that I had fallen into an argument already at full boil. A bit like switching on the recent presidential campaign three months before the vote.<br /><br />
Who was this Candida Moss, and why was she so emphatic? I checked the liner copy: a professor at the University of Notre Dame, a cauldron of political discourse about Christian identity and political action.<br /><br />
This highly readable book presents a corrective to what we Christians thought we knew about our collective story, that the early Christians were widely persecuted for centuries. Furthermore, that this persecution helped spread the faith and proved the righteousness of believers. No. Moss, scholar of the early church and martyrs, contends persecution was rare and the duration brief.<br /><br />
Why is this important? “The myth of Christian martyrdom is not only inaccurate; it has contributed to great violence and continues to support a view of the world in which we are under attack from our fellow human beings,” she writes. Moss suggests that the rhetoric of martyrdom and persecution leads to a “theologizing of violence.”<br /><br />
“If there was never an Age of Martyrs, would Christians automatically see themselves engaged in a war with their critics?” Moss asks. “Would we be more compassionate? Would we be less self-righteous?”<br /><br />
She agrees that there were Christian martyrs in the first centuries, but not as part of an organized, centuries-long persecution — rather, from violating Roman laws. Moss asserts that “prior to 250 there was no legislation in place that required Christians to do anything that might lead them to die.”<br /><br />
The early Christian church, historian Eusebius particularly, chose to frame deaths of Christians as martyrdom, but many accounts are implausibly anachronistic and are forgeries. Moss writes that “once the pious chaff has been separated and the forged weeds cut” there remain only six “authentic accounts” of martyrs, among them Polycarp, Perpetua and Felicity, and Justin Martyr. As for organized persecution by the Roman Empire, she says that Christians died as the result of the imperial government only immediately following the burning of Rome in 64, briefly during the reign of Valerian 257-258 and during what is called the “Great Persecution” under Diocletian 303-305 -- with an renewed period under Maximus Daia between 311 and 313. That all the apostles died as martyrs cannot be verified.<br /><br />
“There’s no doubt that Christians thought they were persecuted. ... This story of Christian martyrdom is a myth that leads Christians to claim the rhetorical high ground, but a myth that makes collaboration and even compassion impossible,” Moss writes.<br /><br />
“Framed by the myth that we are persecuted, dialogue is not only impossible, it is undesirable,” she says. “We revel in the outrage and scandal that our words and opinions elicit. We don’t want to be understood by our opponents.”<br /><br />
Moss cites two recent homilies. Celebrating pro-life advocates at the University of Notre Dame in 2011, retired Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., preached on the Acts of the Apostles, and compared the struggles of the apostles against “the world” in the first century to the struggles of the advocates of the pro-life movement.<br /><br />
Moss writes, “The implication was that pro-lifers are modern-day martyrs and victims of persecution.” The homily prompted her to ask, “If the pro-life advocates are the ill-treated and persecuted apostles ... is the rest of the world full of persecutors and aggressors? Is the rest of the world acting for Satan?”<br /><br />
In a 2012 homily, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., preached “one of the most controversial sermons in recent American memory,” Moss writes. At a Mass for the “Call to Catholic Men of Faith” rally, Jenky “challenged his audience to practice ‘heroic Catholicism’ ” in opposing the Obama administration and the U.S. Health and Human Services mandate for employers to provide contraceptive coverage.<br /><br />
He made this point within the context of multiple examples of the church persecuted and attacked over its 2,000-year history. He cited Nazis, Stalinists and other governments throughout history who “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches.” Moss reports that “what drew heated responses and fervent debate was the implicit comparison that Jenky made between President Obama, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.” Rhetoric does not get any hotter than that.<br /><br />
Moss finds the language of religious persecution on the right and the left of the American political spectrum: Republican candidate Rick Santorum claimed to be a victim of “jihad.” Republican candidate Rick Perry promised to end Barack Obama’s “war on religion.” Liberal <em>New York Times</em> columnist Maureen Dowd’s characterized church hierarchy as participants in a “thuggish crusade” in their dealings with Sister of Mercy and Yale Divinity School Professor Emerita Margaret Farley.<br /><br />
“The use of this language of persecution is discursive napalm. It obliterates any sense of scale or moderation. This stymieing, dialogue-ending language is disastrous for public discourse, disastrous for politics, and results in a more deeply poisoned well for everyone,” Moss writes.<br /><br />
Moss asks us to take a look at our language, and to turn down the heat.<br /><br />
[Maureen Daly works in congregation-based organizing for political change and is a graduate of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.]</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000Anonymous48331 at http://ncronline.orgAuthors distill issues of the diaconate and womenhttp://ncronline.org/books/2012/09/authors-distill-issues-diaconate-and-women
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
<a href="/authors/maureen-daly">Maureen Daly</a> </span>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>WOMEN DEACONS: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE<br />By Gary Macy, William T. Ditewig and Phyllis Zagano<br />Published by Paulist Press, $14.95</p><p><em>Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future</em> is an eminently reasonable book. Plain and simple, at only 128 pages, it is a distillation of answers to the essential questions. To wit: Were there ever women deacons in the Catholic church? Is it presently possible to ordain women according to church teaching and the Second Vatican Council vision of the restored diaconate? What would the church look like with women deacons?<br /><!--break--><br />And, to be very clear, the authors jointly state in their introduction: “This book is not about women priests.”</p><p>Gary Macy, chair of the department of religious studies and professor of theology at Santa Clara University in California, covers the past, the historical argument.</p><p>Macy, author of <em>The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West</em> (Oxford University Press, 2007), writes that there is ample scholarship to show that “women served as deacons from the earliest centuries of Christianity and remained active in both the Eastern and Western churches until the 12th century.” A scholar of the history of liturgy, Macy writes, “Even more important ... is the existence of the liturgy for the ordination of women as deacons.” He quotes from ancient ordination rites. In this chapter and throughout, Women Deacons’ ample endnotes make it a useful reference. For example, there are nine notes on Macy’s first page, each one a full citation of recent collections of historical documents. The endnotes cover 24 of the book’s 128 pages, a handy compendium of sources, the beginning of a syllabus.</p><p>Why did the practice come to an end? Macy cites 12th- and 14th-century canonists and concludes, “It seems that the major reason women stopped being ordained deacons in both the East and the West was the gradual introduction of purity laws from the Hebrew Scriptures. Menstruation and childbirth were seen as impediments to women serving at the altar or to their eventually being ordained.” The other thing that occurred, he says, was a “radical change in the definition of ordination” after the 11th-century church reform movement and the 12th-century Scholastic and canonical debates. Before that time, ordination was the assignment of a certain task or role in the community; after, it was defined as conferring a power that could be exercised in any community. Macy quotes the 12th-century canonist: “But I say that a woman is not able to receive orders. ... If therefore a female is in fact ordained, she does not receive orders.” Macy explains, “In other words, even if a woman were ordained, it would not ‘take.’ The mere fact of being a woman would negate any effect ordination might have.” In one century, “writers moved from conceding that women were once ordained, to teaching that women never were ordained, to teaching, finally, that women never could and never would be ordained.”</p><p>Deacon William T. Ditewig takes up the question of present possibilities, the theological and pastoral question: “Can and should women be ordained as deacons?”</p><p>Ditewig, ordained in 1990, was for five years executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for the Diaconate and the Secretariat for Evangelization. He was professor of theology and director of graduate programs at St. Leo University near Tampa, Fla., and is now director of faith formation, diaconate and planning for the Monterey, Calif., diocese. He is the author of <em>The Emerging Diaconate: Servant Leaders in a Servant Church</em> (Paulist, 2007).</p><p>His question: “Is it possible, based on an examination of church teaching and the vision of the Second Vatican Council vis-à-vis the diaconate, to ordain women as deacons? Ours is a worthy and legitimate question, although this is an emotional issue for many who fear it. ... This is not an act of defiance, which is how some people might interpret it, but rather of enthusiastic commitment to the best our tradition has to offer to the church and the world of our time.”</p><p>Ditewig provides a timeline of key documents of the development of the sacrament of holy orders to include the diaconate as a “proper and permanent order” distinct from priesthood. He notes that Pope John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter <em>Ordinatio Sacerdotalis</em> (“On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone”), “never referred explicitly to the diaconate, nor used more inclusive terms such as clergy.”</p><p>The renewal of the permanent diaconate came about as result of Vatican II. Ditewig writes that, in <em>Lumen Gentium</em>, “deacons were said to be ‘strengthened by sacramental grace’ ” and the decree <em>Ad Gentes</em> (on the “Missionary Activity of the Church”), which said that it was “only right” to strengthen persons who were already preaching, practicing charity, and performing the service of deacons with the grace of ordination. Following the logic of Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, Ditewig says, “The church is entitled to all of the graces the Holy Spirit provides, and one of these graces is the diaconate: Why should the church be denied the gift of women as well as men serving as deacons?”</p><p>The future of women deacons is taken up by Phyllis Zagano, author of <em>Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate in the Catholic Church</em> (Crossroad/Herder, 2000) and columnist for the <em>National Catholic Reporter</em>.</p><p>Zagano quotes church leaders who say there is no need for ordained women deacons because women already do the service work of deacons. She asks, “What can an ordained woman do that an unordained woman cannot? The question is perhaps better posited: What can a cleric do that a non-cleric cannot?” She answers that the two most important functions are preaching and judging in church proceedings. But it is more than a matter of functions. The ordained have also made a “public and permanent dedication of their lives to sacred ministry” and have received “acceptance and ratification of that sacred ministry at the hands of the diocesan bishop.”</p><p>Zagano considers who would become a deacon. If members of religious orders, how would that change their order or their membership? If married, what then would be the role of the husband? She writes, “The practicalities of returning women to the diaconate are complex, but ... the only genuine reason for the church to restore women to ordained diaconal service is the needs of the church.”</p><p><em>Women Deacons</em> is clearly a work of advocacy. Macy, Ditewig and Zagano all believe that the church would be well-served by ordained women deacons. In the book’s foreword, Susan A. Ross of Loyola University Chicago writes, “This book should be required reading for all bishops and clergy.” I agree that it is a very useful book, a quick review of the arguments and a source book for the key documents, presented by three authoritative writers.</p><p>[Maureen Daly was an editor at Catholic News Service for 10 years. She earned a master’s degree in theology at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.]</p></div></div></div>Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:59:28 +0000Anonymous28726 at http://ncronline.orgThe love story at the heart of Christian theologyhttp://ncronline.org/books/2012/09/love-story-heart-christian-theology
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
<a href="/authors/maureen-daly">Maureen Daly</a> </span>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>THE MEANING OF MARY MAGDALENE: DISCOVERING THE WOMAN AT THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY<br />By Cynthia Bourgeault<br />Published by Shambhala Publications, $16.95</p><p>“Why France?” was the first chapter I turned to when I picked up Cynthia Bourgeault’s new treatment of Mary Magdalene. I was indulging a nearly forgotten girlhood fascination with medieval France, the land of troubadours and walled castle towns. I looked to see if my fairy-tale France was part of the story.<br /><!--break--><br />Bourgeault did not disappoint. She begins her serious study, <em>The Meaning of Mary Magdalene</em>, in a fairy-tale setting: at the basilica of St. Mary Magdalene “high on an escarpment crowning the medieval walled city of Vezelay, France.” Vezelay, an important medieval pilgrimage site because it claimed to house the remains of Mary Magdalene, today houses the newly founded order “Fraternités Monastiques de Jerusalem.” It was this community’s Good Friday liturgy in 2005 that made Bourgeault reread scripture and see Mary Magdalene in a new way. She asks her readers to do the same.</p><p>Why France? Because, Bourgeault says, “while it cannot be proven that she actually did live in France, the conviction that she did so is an indelible part of the French cultural memory.” She sees the influence of Mary Magdalene in courtly love, in the reviled Cathars, the “monastic love mysticism” of Bernard of Clairvaux, Taizé chants, and Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of the sacred heart of Jesus as the driving force of cosmic evolution.</p><p><img src="/sites/default/files/stories/images/oldimgs/ss04292011p01phe.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title=" “The Penitent Mary Magdalene,” by Carlo Saraceni (1579-1620) (Newscom/AKG-images/Camera photo)" height="266" width="200" />The first third of the book can be read as a biography of Mary Magdalene. The author strings together Mary Magdalene’s appear- ances in the four canonical Gospels and in the Gnostic gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdalene -- working from a new translation of all three -- to create a coherent life story.</p><p>In this compressed form, it is striking how often Mary Magdalene appears in the canon. The four Gospels name her as witness to the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus. In Luke and Mark she is named as the woman healed of demonic possession. Bourgeault also contends that it was Mary Magdalene who anointed the feet of Jesus, a story found in all four canonical Gospels. Here Bourgeault enters speculation, but offers strong justifications. She then looks at what the Gnostic gospels can add to this story.</p><p>Treating the Gnostic sources as equally valid to complete Magdalene’s portrait, Bourgeault enters into unorthodox territory. I am not qualified to defend or attack her commentary, but I can say that her work makes sense of what would otherwise be disjointed fragments. She spends 40 pages retelling the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and filling in the gaps between the four dialogues of this text.</p><p>She sees three elements of the Gnostic gospels that are distinct from the canonical texts: First, “Jesus’ inner circle of disciples includes both men and women on an equal footing.” Second, Mary Magdalene is the “first among apostles” because she is the one who best understands Jesus’ message. Third, Mary Magdalene is in a special relationship with Jesus in a way that “appears to entail an erotic component.”</p><p>Who is Bourgeault? She is an Episcopal priest, a retreat leader, and author of seven books on centering prayer, chanting the psalms, and Christian spiritual life.</p><p>Although a hermit contemplative, she travels and lectures widely. She is associated with the Aspen Wisdom School in Colorado, the Contemplative Society in Victoria, British Columbia, the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, and New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, Calif.</p><p>Bourgeault says that she wore many hats in writing this book. I found her voice changing not just from chapter to chapter but from paragraph to paragraph. To enter Mary Magdalene’s world, Bourgeault “relied in equal measure on scholarly study, contemplative prayer, and the lived experience of my own heart.” This last element speaks loudest in part three, where she expounds on the power of the romantic love relationship. Moving from scholarly citations to passionately held beliefs and lived convictions, her arguments are multifaceted, and difficult to summarize or contest. How can one argue with someone else’s experience of love?</p><p>She acknowledges that to the reader it may seem that she is making “wildly intuitive leaps.” And it does. Still, I think this work is well worth reading for the interesting speculations she raises. Some may seem exotic, others timeworn, but I think Bourgeault’s smorgasbord of ideas brings new elements to the Christian conversation.</p><p>Bourgeault has three goals in this book. First, “to repair the damage caused by a heavy-handedly patriarchal (and at times flat-out misogynist) ecclesiastical tradition and reclaim Mary Magdalene’s legitimate role as a teacher and apostle.”</p><p>Second, to examine the “emotionally charged question of a possible love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.” She concludes that “such a relationship most likely did exist and is in fact at the heart of the Christian transformational path.” She sees this love as having a “healing and generative energy.”</p><p>Her third goal is to examine “how this healing has unfolded, and continues to unfold, in the Christian West through the largely unacknowledged infusions of Mary Magdalene’s presence.” Bourgeault wants to make the case that “the faithfulness of their two hearts resonating across time and space forms a particular kind of energy channel through which divine compassion pours itself forth as wisdom and creativity.”</p><p>The second and third parts of the book deal with Mary Magdalene’s role as the beloved of Jesus and Bourgeault’s conviction that Christianity must understand and champion a path of “conscious love.” She goes so far as to say that Jesus learned about abundant, self-emptying love through his relationship with Mary Magdalene. Bourgeault sees a love story at the heart of Christian theology, a story that calls for a “responsible revisioning of human sexuality and feminine wisdom.” It is the path of conscious love that is “the true progeny of Mary Magdalene and Jesus” a love that is “visionary, transformative, inclusive and ubiquitously creative.”</p><p>“The church,” she says, “is waiting in the garden for the encounter that will change our institutional hearts.”</p><p>[Maureen Daly, an editor for 10 years at Catholic News Service, works for the Baltimore archdiocese.]</p></div></div></div>Thu, 12 May 2011 16:07:20 +0000Anonymous24255 at http://ncronline.orgHelping someone live until they diehttp://ncronline.org/books/2012/09/helping-someone-live-until-they-die
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
<a href="/authors/maureen-daly">Maureen Daly</a> </span>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>PASSAGES IN CAREGIVING: TURNING CHAOS INTO CONFIDENCE<br />By Gail Sheehy<br />Published by William Morrow, $27.95</p><p>Odds are you’re going to need this book someday.</p><p>It’s a grim topic: caring for a loved one until death. But Sheehy’s <em>Passages in Caregiving</em> is not a grim book. Instead, it is the kind of book that I want to press on friends and relatives, saying, “You must read this!” But I don’t give it away, because it is a book I still need. There are resources I can make use of right now, like an elder exercise program I plan to do with my 90-year-old mother. And there are lists I will need someday, when someone I love enters the last phase of life.<br /><!--break--><br />Most of us will be called on to help someone live until they die. And it won’t be a small part of our lives. Sheehy says that five years is the average length of time that caregivers spend responsible for the care of an ill parent, spouse, sibling, child or friend.</p><p>Sheehy spent 17 years in this role, from her husband’s first bout with cancer to his death.</p><p>She has written a caregiver’s handbook for the long slog. It is directly addressed to the, by turns, frightened, determined, exasperated and exhausted. Subtitled “Turning Chaos Into Confidence,” it is packed with practical advice and numerous helpful Web sites and checklists.</p><p>It is also a memoir of a loving marriage. Sheehy uses the story of the illness of her husband, editor and magazine creator Clay Felker, to show how two talented people kept on with productive lives for as long as possible, and planned for a productive life for Sheehy when she went on alone.</p><p>Sheehy’s great gift is to see societal patterns where individuals see only personal confusion, setbacks, rebirths or triumphs.</p><p>She names eight stages, or “turnings” in the walk from diagnosis to death. She uses the metaphor of the labyrinth, and it is a good one. Walking a labyrinth requires reversing directions. The walker may feel lost, but following the path leads to the center and safely out again. Sheehy aims to show how the caregiver can walk through this experience and emerge whole.</p><p>She predicts “Shock and Mobilization” at the first crisis, then settling in to the “New Normal,” followed by “Boomerang,” when families realize that the emergency measures need to be adjusted for the long haul. With long-term roles in place, main caregivers confront “Playing God,” the tendency to believe they are wholly responsible for the patient’s health. Caregivers look for help when they realize “I Can’t Do This Anymore.” The sixth turning is “Coming Back,” when the caregiver begins to form a life beyond the sickroom. Seventh, “The In-between Stage,” is when a patient is not sick enough to be hospitalized but not close enough to death for hospice.</p><p>Finally there is “The Long Good-bye.”</p><p>Twice before, Sheehy has charted life’s passages and influenced the national conversation. In 1974, she published <em>Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life</em>, giving names to new adult life phases of Americans up to age 50. Hugely popular, it was on <em>The New York Times</em> best-seller list for three years. In 1995, she published <em>New Passages</em>. She observed that many adults were making fresh starts at an age when people used to think they were old. The late 40s and early 50s she called the second adulthood. Again she hit the best-seller lists.</p><p>Public discourse was littered with stories of people in their fabulous 50s who, having made their millions, were at last opening their dream bed-and-breakfast in Costa Rica or Cape Cod. Younger boomers heard these stories with some envy and disdain. Most could not expect such affluence, but Sheehy was right to predict that late middle age would require most to retool and regroup.</p><p>Ignobly, I felt a bit of schadenfreude when I began <em>Passages in Caregiving</em>. Sheehy, the cheerleader for exhilarating second adulthood, had found, as so many others have, that caregiving stepped in to claim the time and energy planned for adventures in self-expression.</p><p>But Sheehy quickly put me to shame. Younger than the cohort of her first two books, I have at last aged into her target market. I need to know what she has to say. For example, her chapter on how and when to conduct a family meeting is worth 10 times the price of the book. She details what should be on the agenda: the patient’s prognosis, daily and weekly caregiving needs, financial concerns, family members’ feelings and roles they might play, and then how they can arrive at problem-solving solutions. I recognized mistakes my family has made, places where we got it right, and ideas for how to do better next time.</p><p>And there will be a next time. Family caregiving is a predictable crisis of middle and later life. Sheehy quotes an AARP survey that indicated 65 million Americans are caring for someone with a long-term illness or disability. That is a lot of potential readers. Sheehy has helped shape the public conversation before. With <em>Passages in Caregiving</em>, she has done it again.</p><p>[Maureen Daly, a former editor at Catholic News Service, is a freelance writer in Baltimore.]</p></div></div></div>Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:02:48 +0000Anonymous21517 at http://ncronline.orgA mystery that explores spiritual growthhttp://ncronline.org/books/2012/09/mystery-explores-spiritual-growth
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
<a href="/authors/maureen-daly">Maureen Daly</a> </span>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>UNFINISHED DESIRES<br />By Gail Godwin<br />Published by Random House, $26</p><p>Gail Godwin’s <em>Unfinished Desires</em> is a mystery set in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. Reading it was like eating a whole pan of fudge. I didn’t want to keep on but I couldn’t stop until I was done.<br /><!--break--><br />It is the kind of book I would read if I found it on the shelf of a summer cottage but not something I would buy.</p><p>Yet Godwin has a huge reputation: She is a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grants. There must be more to her than what I was seeing here. A trip to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Central Library revealed 21 Godwin works still in circulation and on the shelves. Clearly she has a reading public.</p><p>I decided to give her other books a sampling. I spent a couple of weeks residing deeper inside the writing mind of Gail Godwin than Godwin herself. I found recurring characters and themes: professional women in academe or journalism, women formed by boarding school friendships, girls with struggling or neglectful mothers, affectionate grandmothers, and threatening stepfathers, early marriage and divorce, longtime affairs with married men. All these elements are found in <em>Unfinished Desires</em>.</p><p>Godwin is also informed about many things Catholic. She writes about religious life and seminary with nuance and intelligence. I went back to her new book with a new appreciation.</p><p>The structure of the novel is complex. Narrators change and speak from the 1930s, the 1950s, 2001, and later. The reader would do well to pay close attention to chapter headings that label place and time.</p><p>Having spent some time as a student and a teacher in all girls’ schools, I am heartily sick of the overheated feminine adolescent drama that fuels much of the novel. (Although I confess it kept me turning the pages.) But interwoven with the girlish hysteria was something to me much more interesting: the narration by the former headmistress, a nun now in her 80s as she looks back over her own life.</p><p>Mother Suzanne Ravenel is now resident in a home for retired religious where the sister in charge makes a point of treating her with no special deference. Once a year she travels back to the South and is the coddled houseguest of fawning, sentimental alumnae. At their urging she accepts the task of writing a history of the school. Godwin is masterly in her control of the many dictions of the novel. The cloying, respectful adulation of well-bred Southern matrons remembering school days, the breezy enthusiasm of alumna magazine news notes, the earnest classroom essay, and the student-authored play in verse are just a few found here.</p><p>Mother Ravenel’s cool formal prose of a reverential institutional history alternates with her emotional inner dialogue and self-critical examination of conscience. She looks back at what motivated her entrance to religious life, how she conducted herself when she wielded power, and how she can assimilate these experiences into her late-life identity. It is an exploration of spiritual growth. Godwin shows readers how Mother Ravenel learns about herself, and how she continues to delude herself.</p><p>Above all the book is a portrait of a school that no longer exists. The fictional Mount St. Gabriel’s of Mountain City was the actual St. Genevieve’s in Asheville, N.C., where Godwin spent her formative adolescent years. Like any boarding school, it was a world in itself. As a convent school in the mountains of the South, an area not then hospitable to Catholics, it combined rigorous academics with defined Southern decorum and high piety.</p><p>Like the now-demolished Victorian building that became St. Genevieve’s School in 1908, the world of the Southern convent school today exists only in pictures and memories. Unfinished Desires brings that school culture back to life.</p><p>[Maureen Daly, a freelance writer living in Baltimore, is a graduate of the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary’s Seminary and University]</p></div></div></div>Fri, 07 May 2010 14:18:33 +0000Anonymous18108 at http://ncronline.orgHow the remotely possible could become realhttp://ncronline.org/news/women-religious/how-remotely-possible-could-become-real
<span class="field field-name-field-byline field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">
Maureen Daly </span>
<section class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
<p>Virginia Woolf, in <em>A Room of One’s Own</em>, expresses her amazement at reading, for the first time, a description of a friendship between two women.</p><p>“Chloe liked Olivia,” Woolf reads in a novel by a young woman. “And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature,” writes Woolf. “And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women were represented as friends. ... But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that.”</p> </section>
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:16:02 +0000Anonymous16926 at http://ncronline.org